1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus, and more particularly, to a printing apparatus including one or more feeding units.
2. Related Art
There are Letter sheet cultures (at present, the United States, Canada, and some areas of the United Mexican State) where the letter size is used as a normal sheet and A4 sheet cultures (other nations) where the A4 size is used as a normal sheet. The size of the A4 sheet and the size of the Letter sheet are similar to each other, but are subtly different from each. Therefore, in order to print data in which a sheet of the Letter size is designated to be printed in the A4 sheet cultures, it is necessary to prepare the sheet of the Letter size and change the sheet by an application or it is necessary to reduce the data size to the size of the A4 sheet upon the printing. Of course, the same problem also arises when data sent from the A4 sheet cultures are printed in the Letter sheet cultures.
In general, in order to solve this problem, the printing is executed on different sheets. For example, in a printer equipped with a plurality of feeding trays, a priority order is determined for the different feeding trays and the sheets are replaced in accordance with the priority order. With this method, downtime can be reduced since a sheet error does not occur. However, data may be printed on the sheet of a size that is completely different from a designated size. When the sheet size is smaller than the size of the data, the edges of the data may not be printed. Moreover, when important information is present in the portions which are not printed, a sheet or ink has to be additionally used in re-printing and it takes more time.
Accordingly, as disclosed in JP-A-2002-36679 and JP-A-2002-248831, a sheet size replaceable for each output sheet is determined in advance and printing is executed on the replacement sheet upon non-existence of a sheet so as not to execute the re-printing.
JP-A-2002-248831 discloses a technique in which printing is executed on the replacement sheet by setting the replaceable sheet for each output sheet and setting the existence or non-existence of change magnification used to execute the printing on the replacement sheet or the print position on a print sheet.
However, some users want a variety of print qualities and some users want printing without change in the setting of print data. Some users want a print result to be immediately printed even though the end of the print result is not printed to some extent. Some users do not care about the print result set in the print data as long as the print quality is ensured to some extent. Moreover, the technique disclosed in JP-A-2002-36679 or JP-A-2002-248831 has a problem in that the replacement sheet has to be set every sheet and thus it takes some time to execute settings.